Monday, December 17, 2012

Finally you can access all those things that should have been left unsaid. Taking a cue from Google’s data portability initiative, Twitter has started rolling out an experimental feature that will allow its users to download all of their tweets, since the beginning of their relationship with the service. The downloadable tweets will be packaged in a nice little archive, that you can open in a web browser and read like a webpage.

Just last month, Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo promised that users will be able to download everything they ever posted on Twitter. The feature is not available to all users right now. Twitter says that it is currently testing the ability to download tweets with “a very small percentage” of users. To see whether you are influential enough to be included within the small percentage, head over to Twitter’s settings page and scroll down until you see the section “Your Twitter Archive” along with a button to “Request your archive”.

One Twitter user Navjot Singh who found this option on one of his accounts, has briefly blogged about the process:

On clicking this, twitter informs that they will mail you the download link when the archive is ready. Yes, its just like how Facebook’s archive system works. Once you get the mail and download it you will get a zip file with archive in html form. Extracting it and you will see all your tweets sorted in calendar format.

According to TheNextWeb, the HTML file opens to display a page similar in layout to Twitter’s own website. It allows you to browse your tweets by month, and search the complete archive. The archive also includes CSV and JSON files, the latter complete with each tweet’s metadata.